Google is slowly but surely progressing towards becoming the centre of our global communications. The launch in the next few weeks of the new service Google Voice is another step in this direction. Google Voice will allow users to maintain a single phone number forever and maintain that number diverting it to any number that you may currently be using, home phone, work phone, mobile, hotel room etc. It has a raft of features that will grow exponential moving forward, some of these include:

• Make phone calls and conference calls
• Store and recall messages convert messages to text
• Different greetings for each person in your address book
• Centralise all your contacts
• Integrating the web and your phone

David Pogue writes in the New York Times, "One number for life," pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes. From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of "The Lawnmower Man."

The other important point is that it’s free, so what’s in it for Google? If it is a success it will make Google will become the centre of your communications system, effectively giving them control and data on everyone you communicate with on every channel giving them a multitude of ways of monetising the system. Even though it is not available in Australia yet I’m sure it won’t take long particularly given they already have the infrastructure setup for phone services so I for one am hopeful it won’t take too long.

For more info check out the Google Voice website and an article by TechCrunch.



What are your thoughts?


Dan Oxnam, Interaction Director